Marketing your blog: 6 tips to grow your audience

If you’re writing posts for your blog, you want an audience. Nobody wants to perform in an empty room! Ranking high in search engines by doing your SEO flawlessly will, of course, help. But you can do more! In this post, I’ll give you lots of blog marketing tips to make sure your audience will grow and will keep on growing!

Tip 1: Start with a mission

Marketing has to do with increasing the number of people who know and like your company, your products, your brand. To be successful at marketing, you should always choose marketing strategies that fit the mission of your website. And to do that, of course, you need to properly define your site’s mission! Once you know your mission and what makes your company or your website unique, make sure it’s always reflected in the content of your marketing.

Example: Yoast’s mission and marketing

The mission of Yoast is (in a nutshell) to help people optimize their website. To fulfill that mission, we offer free and premium products, as well as courses. We use several channels to reach out to our audience, such as our blog, our newsletter, and social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. We make sure that the things we share fit our mission and our brand. That does not mean that every post we write is about optimizing websites. As part of our branding, we also share posts on and photos of, for example, events we attend and our office life, especially on Facebook.

Tip 2: Choose marketing that fits your brand

Marketing should also fit your brand. Branding is the way you want to present your company to the world, visually or in the way you communicate. It could even be in the way you make your products. Perhaps you want your brand to be hip and young. Maybe you’d rather come across as traditional and solid. It’s up to you- just make sure you’re consistent. Branding is a matter of personal taste, and most importantly, branding should reflect your mission.

Read more: Where your branding meets your keyword strategy »

Tip 3: Get to know your audience

An important step in marketing is to find out what your audience looks like. Who are my visitors? Where are they from? How do they currently engage with my blog posts? In order to answer these questions, there are different kinds of research you can do. Google Analytics could give you some great insights. And, how about conducting a survey? Once you have a clear view of what your audience looks like, it’s much easier to reach them on (for instance) social media.

Tip 4: Think about new audiences!

Now that you have some idea of your current audience; does it consist of the people you want to reach? How could you expand it? Have you considered all potential audiences you could reach with site?

If you think about your audience, it’ll be easier to find growth potential. For example, it could well be that your current audience is very small, but consists of exactly the kind of people you want to have on your website. Your growth question would then be: where do I find more of these people? It could also be that your current audience and your desired audience are somewhat different. Your growth question would then be: where do I find my new audience?

Tip 5: Find the right platforms

Having a clear vision of the people you want to reach is important for the next marketing steps you’ll take. Usually, trying to reach an audience of hip teenagers on Facebook is simply not a good marketing strategy. Nor is trying to reach an audience of older retirees on Instagram. Both the content of your posts, as well as the social media channel you choose should be finetuned on the audience you want to reach.

In addition to focusing on social media, consider sending out a newsletter. That’s a great way to stay in touch with your readers and regularly send them on-brand content, so you’ll stay top of mind. You may not get everyone from your audience to subscribe, but those who do will be highly engaged.

And, perhaps you have the option to reach out to a blog in a similar niche to yours and offer a guest post? This could be a great opportunity to both reach a larger audience and work on your network at the same time. Don’t go around sending low-quality guest posts to every random blog you can find – that’s not a good marketing strategy and won’t do you any good. But if you can write a great post for another blog that’s reaching a (bigger) audience that you’d also like to reach, go for it!

Tip 6: Advertising

If you have a budget, you could also decide to put ads on, for instance, Facebook or Google to promote your blog. Facebook offers the option to boost your post, making sure it’ll get more exposure.

Facebook actually allows you to really focus on the demographic you would like to reach with settings for age group, location and interests, making it quite easy to target your desired audience.

Conclusion on blog marketing

Devising a blog marketing strategy to roll out alongside your SEO strategy helps grow the audience of your blog. So, get to know your company and your audience! Mind you, growth does not equal more money. If you want to make money with your blog, there’s a whole lot of different things you could do. But marketing your blog with these tips will definitely help you find your voice and an audience that’s eager to hear what you have to say!

Keep reading: Blogging: the ultimate guide »